The Colleen Bawn in Her Element: Sensation, Spectatorship, Meaning

Abstract

This essay considers the appeal of the ‘water cave’ scene in Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn to nineteenth-century spectators by focusing on its iconography and visual address. The written archive is of limited value on this question since contemporary commentators struggled to explain its popularity. Recent scholarly accounts have identified this and other sensation scenes as vehicles for eliciting spectator ‘affect’, meaning involuntary somatic responses, prompted in this case by the spectacle of physical danger. While this approach has been useful in seeking readings beyond those embedded in language and text, it has tended to confine the discussion to a narrow range of extreme affective states associated with anxiety and terror. This essay considers interpretations arising out of the ‘affective turn’ before proposing a new direction. Working across a range of images, I address the specific visual nature of the ‘water cave’ scene, drawing out a more subtle and multi-faceted set of ideas than those with which sensation drama is generally associated, and proposing an alternative reading to do with feminine power and transfiguration.